One visitor over the weekend had no referrer and a user agent which started with the following: blocked by Outpost (http://www.agnitum.com). According to Google, this Outpost Firewall blocks referrers for “privacy”, but I could still see the visitor’s IP address. So yeah.

-Treat your Starbucks Barista well and you will be paid back handsomely. I probably go to the Starbucks near me at least once a week (often enough to notice when a longtime barista has added highlights to her hair), mostly on the way to work in the morning. I’ve gotten into the habit of being polite and tipping the loose change I get from a Triple Grande Vanilla Latte. Every so often, I get an upgrade of an extra shot or a larger size. Or, even better, getting my drink faster than the lady in front of me who was whining about her Venti Soy No-whip Caramel Macchiatto.

-I’m now Skype capable thanks to people I know who are using it. The only reason why I’m using it is because it’s free, because I’ve been unimpressed with the user interface (at least on the Mac OS X client). I also procured the Logitech USB Headset 250 to use with Skype which was ok, but I will most likely upgrade to something else of better quality.

And now Ben Folds is doing a piano reinterpretation of a Dr. Dre song which I won’t mention on this family blog. It’s hilarious (if you don’t have little ears around). The audience is singing the chorus at the moment.

Later tonight, Bright Eyes and Death Cab For Cutie!

Update: Apparently, the feed isn’t live - so no other bands tonight. That stinks.

Update 2: It seemed that the feed was live on Saturday and Sunday…but they had non-main stage acts. Which was all well and good…if you’re that into the Disco Biscuits or something. Otherwise, I’m not impressed with the XM’s coverage.
[tags]XM, XM Radio, Bonnaroo, Bonnaroo 2006 Ben Folds, Bright Eyes, Death Cab For Cutie [/tags]

So, the other night I was searching on Google and let’s just say that I could have been searching for dentists in Champaign, Illinois. And since I misspelled the state, I got some very, very curious SERPS such as the ones below.

Being curious about the results from the .info domains, I went ahead and clicked on one and there was a page that sorta kinda looked like a Google results page without the Google logo.

Even better, I took a minute and scrolled down to the bottom of this particular .info page which had apparently mirrored Google results page for “Champaign Illinois dentist”. It was this mirroring which made the bogus .info pages appear high in Google searches.

I was looking through my site logs recently and noticed a curious referrer from Google. Namely, it was a referrer from a Google Finance page. Being intrigued that I would see such a referrer, I went looking for the page in question and noticed something of interest…Google Finance now has a section showing recent blog posts about a company.

This new blog section is all well and good, except that blog post of mine which mentioned “optical cables” generically was being shown in the Blog Posts section of the Optical Cable Corporation’s Google Finance page. Whoops.

As of this writing, 06/11/2006, my blog post isn’t showing, but a forum post from MacNN which mentions “optical cables” in a generic format is. Double whoops.

Ooh, the old adage of “do things you enjoy and you’ll find someone that enjoys it with you” finally applies: online gamers find love (subscription required) shockingly enough, online. (There’s a WoW joke here, but that would be too easy.)

There’s this little known company in Canada that apparently offers “brand management services” by presumably crawling the Web for specific content relating to their search engine challenged customers. Here’s a news release. The name of this company is Brandimensions.

I mention this company because I saw this wonderful referrer in my logs, and even better, the referrer log didn’t record what pages they were reviewing.

The customers.brandimensions.com URL brings one to a customer login page, where, I’m guessing, a customer could go and look up where their brand is being mentioned on the Web. In my case, apparently my blog was linked in their system in some context - I can’t see what context though, and that bothers me.
I’m not the only one who feels this way, take a look at this thread which explains what is going on.